Jooste

okay I've thought a lot about PSA ratings on digital cards now... @Origins_TCG is either genius or insane for trying this. 1. the cards can’t be damaged so it fundamentally feels silly 2. but it adds a tier of rarity that digital cards painfully lack. typical card rarity systems ~7 states (common, uncommon, rare, legendary, etc.) PSA 1-10 ratings with .5 states = 19 x7 = 133 states a card can be in on Origins cards will come in sealed packs, boxes and cases that you can leave sealed on Steam, which is cool for the Alpha set especially. Origins cards can really be thought of as card-skins since the playable cards will all be free to use (this has been confirmed by Origins). the obvious objection is that grading exists to measure condition, and these cards have no physical condition. a digital card can’t be bent or come off the press miscut. grading something that can't degrade looks like importing the aesthetics of a hobby without the substance underneath, and I think that's a reasonable objection. the second objection is about who controls supply. A physical print run is constrained by a factory and a calendar. A digital print run is constrained by nothing. Origins could resolve this by publishing the print amounts and schedules. third, there's a pull any studio has to resist here. A collector layer with real money in it creates pressure to tilt the game toward the people spending, but with Origin’s promise to make all cards free to play with, this seems like a non-issue. I think the last point is why collectors will like this more than their first reaction might indicate. Hearthstone, Snap, and other digital TCGs operate on closed ecosystems - you can’t trade cards so they have no value outside of the decks you can put them in. Rarity only really becomes interesting to the player when they are also the collector. Gods Unchained was the first game outside of Artifact to test what digitally scarce cards could look like with a secondary market… but they took it a bit too far. extremely scarce cards from their Genesis collection (only printed once and never again) like Demogorgon and Pyramid Warden were integral to almost every competitive deck. this (predictably) nuked the competitive scene and created frustration, despite driving volume in the secondary market. this has already been avoided (as stated above, the tradable cards are more like skins of cards, there is no playable benefit besides how they look) the draw back here is you lose the inherent value of a card that is OP, but there’s much less risk of a valuable card losing its value by getting nerfed, or OP decks chasing players away because they cost too much. also… grading a physical card sucks - you have to ship an object worth money to another state, insuring it twice, waiting months, and paying the same fee whether it comes back a 10 or a 7. a 7 can leave the card worth less than it was raw, and you commit to that before you know. Removing the transit, the wait and the gamble is a real improvement rather than a cosmetic one. there's no published grade scale, so nobody outside the studio knows how many strata sit above the seven tiers or how they're determined. there's no live population report today either. published rates and a closed print run are more supply information than most digital collectibles have offered, and a running census of what exists at each grade would be a different thing again. this might be a digital TCG that has a secondary market worth participating in.